milliways_bar | (no subject)

"Does it do that to you a lot?" asks the giant of a man sitting near the door. Then he notices the fanny-pack and points to it. "Psst... your inventory's showing."

"Usually I come here on purpose. When it's by accident, it means I'm wearing something embarrassing."

Hmmm. Another sprite. Friend of Vanellope's, or something else?

He raises his eyebrow, but swivels the nearly empty pack around behind him.

"Ouch! Makes me glad I have to make an effort to get here!"

Ralph's brain ticks over enough for him to recognize the green kid that Vanellope, Freeman and Cyborg have all mentioned. "You must be Enzo Matrix." He holds out one humongous hand for shaking.* "Wreck-It Ralph, from the Fix-It Felix Jr. cabinet at Litwak's Family Fun Center."

* If the narrative had been thinking, it would have reversed the order of icon use.

Enzo shakes it, feeling the novelty of shaking a larger hand than his own. "Friend of Vanellope's?"

"I have that privilege, yeah. She says you're some kind of... system-utility-in-training, wasn't it? From a seriously buggy system, it sounds like."

He thinks a moment. "And I just realized the door must've grabbed you from a training exercise."

"My Games exam, actually. I'm a Guardian cadet, yeah. Antivirus and system repair. And it's not just one buggy system, we take care of the whole Net."

"I hope you make the grade. The way I hear Games work for you guys, the Net needs all the protection it can get." Headshake. "Nobody should have to be an NPC and a utility."

"Thanks, but honestly, the Games are the fun part. And the situation's improved. I mean, they're still dangerous to the system, but losing doesn't mean automatic nullification anymore."

See? That's good!

"Well, that's something anyway. I don't think any of us in the arcade would enjoy our games if our lives were really on the line. Or if the damage didn't reset after Game Over."

"Seriously. I'm glad it's better for you. Of course, your systems are just for Games. If it worked the same as ours... well, it wouldn't. Work, I mean."

Ralph chuckles dryly. "I'll say. Do you know if consoles have that problem? In 'your world' anyway?" The quotes around "your world" are half-hearted, but they're there; he thinks of it as like the way games are different from each other, which is probably not a bad way of wrapping your head around it.

Enzo gets it, certainly. They're about as different from each other as mildly different Earths are.

"I wish I did. We haven't had any contact with them yet. I don't think they can, though. I mean, they'd be destroyed almost immediately."

"There is that. Although I hear consoles got online starting with the sixth or seventh generation, but I think that's still in your future."

~~It occurs to the narration that Xboxes use a Windows-based OS architecture, and that maybe that's why they're so crash-prone.~~

"Probably," Enzo agrees. "So what's your Game like?"

"Vanellope didn't tell you? Well, it's a fairly simple plot. I'm trying to wreck the Niceland apartment building, which has gone up on top of my woodland home; the player controls Felix as he runs around with his magic hammer trying to fix what I've wrecked, dodging the bricks and other debris I throw at him. Sometimes Mary and the other lady Nicelanders leave pies on their windowsills for him; if he can get to one without getting clobbered, he gets all supercharged, lightning-fast and invulnerable, and probably wins the round, whereupon the Nicelanders award him a medal and throw me off the roof."

Enzo pictures this as Ralph describes it. He nods. "Sounds pretty standard."

Ralph nods in return. "Standard enough that I got through almost 30 years of it. Then I looked at the timeanddate one morning and realized the game's 30th anniversary was coming up, and I didn't have any friends to celebrate with. I think Felix was the only other character in the game who didn't at least dislike me, and that was just because the guy doesn't have a mean bone in his body. I guess I realized they'd been hating me for so long that it was starting to rub off on me. That's when I finally broke down and went to a Bad-Anon meeting — wait, has Vanellope told you about those?"

"No. Conversations with Vanellope tend to go..." He waves his hands in a manner to suggest random directions.

Ralph chuckles. "Where the Pixy Stix flow? That's a fact; she's a permanent 9-year-old on an extended sugar rush, pardon the expression. It takes a lot of patience to wait her out, but trust me, it gets easier the longer and the better you know her.

"Anyway, Bad-Anon. I don't know if any other arcades have it, or even if they need it, but at Litwak's, Clyde from Pac-Man set it up a while back. It's basically what it says on the label, a support group for bad guys who need, well, somebody who knows what it feels like when nobody likes you."

"Dude. So you're... I mean, you're like an actor, right? I mean, you're not a bad guy bad guy, you're just the," he waves a hand while thinking of the word, "antagonist."

"Yeah, it's just a role. Just a function. But I really was smashing up their homes, even if I had my in-story reasons and it all got repaired anyway. So when I decided to invite myself to the party... it didn't go well. I wasn't trying to smash the cake, but I wasn't really trying not to either.

"The only good thing that came out of it was Gene, the building manager, telling me what it'd take for them to accept me: if I could get someone to give me a medal like the ones they give Felix. And that was only good because it led to me meeting Vanellope, which she probably hasn't gone into detail about that either."

"No, she really hasn't."

He senses hijinks.

Wacky hijinks.

"Not surprised; she doesn't like to talk about it. I don't either, but apparently I need to talk about it with someone besides the group. She doesn't come into the story for a while, though. First stop was Tapper's, to see if he had a line on a medal, or failing that, if anybody'd left one in the Lost and Found box."

"Does that count?"

"I don't know, and it didn't matter, because just as I was giving up, a guy in fancy-shmancy high-tech armor showed up complaining about the game he was in, where he had to climb a building and fight bugs every day, and all for a lousy medal. And then he passed out."

Well, knocked himself out panicking over a humble cockroach, but who's counting?

"So I *ahem* borrowed his armor, squeezed myself into it, left him a pair of Zangief's trunks that had wound up in the box somehow — yeah, I don't wanna think about it either — and boarded the tram to the latest thing at Litwak's: Hero's Duty."

"FPS?"

Ralph slumps. "You guessed it quicker than I did. I was expecting something like the guys from Centipede, not... well, you've seen those T-Minus devices?" He reaches into his overalls and pulls out his own tCrab just in case. "Imagine that, only the size of a small car, and with more teeth than the entire cast of Primal Rage. Looking back, I'm amazed Markowski took an entire week to snap."

"Sounds intense," agrees Enzo, who would totally enjoy it, although probably not without variation.

"I am not ashamed to admit I completely freaked out in a matter of minutes. I kind of got in the faceless protagonist's way and got it clobbered by a Cy-Bug. At which point the sarge in charge, a brass-buster by the name of Calhoun, explained that a marine's job is to keep the path clear for the protagonist and stay out of its way, so it can get to the top of the tower and get the Medal of Heroes. That's when I decided to go AWOL."

"Well, yeah, that far out of your genre."

Enzo has removed his helmet, propped his boffer sword against a table, and ordered a Cocoa. May as well enjoy storytime properly.

Ralph nods. "So I decided to ditch Markowski's armor and his squad, and go get that medal on my own terms. The player's supposed to climb the building on the inside, but I climb on the outside of the Niceland apartments, and I climbed on the outside of the Cy-Bug building."

"Good thinking! I think."

His own game does not have giant bugs. This might make a difference.

"I thought so too. I smashed the window just like I smash windows at home, climbed into the room, and there it was, hovering above a platform, unhatched eggs all around it. The Medal of Heroes. I tippy-toed past the eggs, stepped up, and the medal was mine. General Hologram started his speech, but I was barely even listening; my mind was already full of the new life I was about to get. So as I stepped down off the platform, I wasn't really looking where I was going..."

"Whaaaaat happened?"

"Got egg on my feet. And then baby bugs on my feet. And then on the rest of me. I managed to shake them off and stumble to the escape pod that's ready to get the player character out, but one of them was in the pod with me, so it kind of went out of control.

"As we zoomed toward the outlet, I could see Calhoun and the rest of the squad standing guard over a short guy. Time seemed to slow down as I went past them. It was Felix. He knew I'd gone Turbo."

Blink. "Say what?"

"...oh yeah, I forgot to tell you about Turbo. He's a racer... well, he was a racer from a game called Turbo Time. He'd been at Litwak's for about as long as Felix and me, and Turbo Time was our most popular racing game. Until '87, when we got a RoadBlasters machine and his adoring public abandoned him. So he abandoned his cabinet and went into RoadBlasters. Wound up crashing the game and getting both cabinets removed. There were rumors that he'd gotten out before the plugs got pulled, but never any confirmed sightings — just 'I heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend who heard it from Johnny Cage who heard it from Tapper himself...'"

Edited (One missing semicolon can ruin your whole tag.) 2013-05-10 02:55 (UTC)

"Whoa. Turbo's, um, also the name of the Prime Guardian."

"Really? Go figure. What's he like?"

In reply, Enzo does his best impression of the 'talking to you had better be worth the inevitable worsening of my ulcer' expression which is his own usual experience of Prime Guardian Turbo.

"Ohh. One of those. He should meet Sarge sometime — that Sergeant Calhoun I mentioned. They'd get along great, assuming they didn't try to perma-kill each other."

Enzo grins. "He's not always like that. Just... whenever I meet with him."

"What kind of reasons does he have?"

"Well, I mean, I'm the Guardians' official prophet. Did Vanellope tell you the part where we can't see out of the computer?"

"...oh yeah, she did mention that. Must've made this place an even bigger shock for you guys than it was for her."

"No kidding. Everyone knows the Users exist, but until we came here, no one really knew what they were like. Most sprites still don't, 'cause we don't want to freak everyone out, but I decided it was kinda my duty to tell the other Guardians at least. Turbo agreed, but it still gives him a headache."